Elite athletes are the only beings on earth capable of attending their own funeral, because that, as one of the best tennis players of all time, Roger Federer, explained, is what retirement is equivalent to: saying goodbye to your “own life”. They dieyoung people, year up, year down, depending on the discipline. And almost no one prepares them for the next day, that is, for the resurrection, as Jorge Valdano warned: “The same day you lose the game, the great passion; the privilege of fame and disproportionate income. When you play, you never talk about this, it’s taboo, just like friends don’t talk to each other about death. I would have liked if they had forced me to prepare for that moment. It is a deficit for the clubs because football is a rabid present.” All of this explains why the coincidence last week on the court between Lebron James and his son Bronny has received the treatment of a “historical event.” It is. In the middle of those ephemeral and extremely intense careers, designed to amass the money of several lives in one, two generations of the same family looked each other in the eyes before passing the ball at the top of world basketball, the NBA. It doesn’t happen every day.
Bronny James is 20 years old. Papa Lebron will turn 40 on December 30, exactly 17 days after Cazorla de mi vida, who has given Oviedo an extension of his sporting career to return it to its place: the first division. Watching the Magician dancing, sneaking between four players of the opposing team, is still a gift. But being, as he is, in top shape, it will be difficult to see him coincide on the grass of the first category with his son, although Enzo, 14 years old, promises. The Internet is full of videos that demonstrate that like father… like father.
Rivaldo and his son Rivaldinho did get to play—and score—together in the Brazilian second division, when the former, formerly of Barça and Deportivo, was 43 years old and the latter was 20. Football has hosted many sagas—the Reina; the Sanchís, the Alonso, the Maldini, the Busquets…—, but until now it has been very difficult to see two generations of a family meeting on the pitch. The average age of players in La Liga is 27 years old.
The genes, the passion, the money. It is common for parents who are fans or practitioners of some sport, including professionals, to want their child to follow in their footsteps or to fulfill the dream that they could not fulfill. For this reason, I suppose, there are fry meetings that have become high-risk matches in the stands. Then there are fathers and fathers. At one extreme would be the boxer Mike Agassi, who, years after fleeing out of a window in his most important fight when he saw the size of his rival, dedicated himself to mortifying his son Andre to make up for his own cowardice. The methods were masterfully described in openwritten by Pulitzer Prize winner JR Moehringer, such as throwing him 2,500 balls a day at 180 kilometers per hour when he was just a child or administering speed being still a minor, reasons why on the first page of the biography of the winner of eight Grand Slam titles it says: “I hate tennis.” At the other extreme would be, for example, Bojan Krkic, a footballer and father who was baptized—damn the time—as “the new Messi.” In the documentary about his son, named after him, (Bojan, beyond the smileMovistar), gets emotional when talking about the unbearable pressure, about his kid’s impossible battle against the expectations generated by others, and tells how, after receiving a dizzying offer from Chelsea, they decided to accept a more modest one from Barça thinking it was the right thing to do. better for your child. All efforts to protect him were not enough. Bojan junior became so distraught that he caused a plane to turn around from the take-off runway and gave up a European Championship with the Spanish team due to anxiety problems. Time, fortunately, usually puts things in their place, providing a kind of delayed justice, and today Bojan is recognized as the brave man that he is, the one who dared to lift one of the many taboos that still weigh on football. elite, that of mental health, and as the precocious talent that came to play in the best leagues in Europe. “Success,” says his psychoanalyst, “can also be traumatic.” As much as Mike Agasssi’s loss by default.
